Film Review

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } The Paperboy Lee Daniels (UK 2013) Matthew McConaughey; Nicole Kidman; John Cusack; Zak Efron Viewed Tyneside Cinema 25 March 2013; ticket price £8.00 Ending up in the swamp The writers who have chronicled the dirty corrupt core of schizo USA, Robert Thompson, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, James Elroy have all usually written from the first person perspective. What they knew was that this perspective enabled them to express the state of mind of their protagonists. And the key to their writing is how events unfold within this state of mind. Writing from the first person allows expressive penetration in understanding the situations and events that comprise a story. The committed narrator gives the story a psychic framework through which actions and purposes can be grounded in a social and cultural but individuated matrix. When the first person device works, the reader/viewer is drawn into a particular subjective world governed by particular psychological rules. Lee Daniel’s (LD) The Paperboy (PB) which he co-wrote with the author (Peter Dexter) of the novel, does not use a first person narrative. The device used to set up and tell PB’s story, is a retrospective interview, the recalled memory of the black housemaid to the family at the time of the events. Aside from fitting up the film; which is set in the 60’s, with its retro political correctness, the device is purely mechanical. It’s a non-perspective in the critical sense of mediating understanding. The maid’s telling works as an aide-narrative to trigger and prompt the situations that engage the doings of the main characters: Charlotte Jack, Ward and Hilary. This interview device fails to deepen engagement with the material; it does not open the movie out into the possibility of entering into an immanent world. The only world engendered is a world of backgrounds, a world as a series of possible suggestions against which the action is construed. And yet PB like the works of the American noir writers is set in an unbounded world. PB is set in a particular place, Florida, at a particular time, the 1960’s, and proposes a particular set of situations: an investigation of the possible wrongful incarceration of a man for murder and the effect on this situation of his would be gaol-bird bride. These situations are mediated through human agencies (newspapers, law enforcement agencies,social agencies) which link the characters fatefully to the wider world. Unlike for instance the works of Tennessee Williams which are tightly bound into the psychic realities of the settings and the characters, and in which all development takes place within these boundaries. American noir style works to construct an individual take on the complex of relations with social agencies, so that they are absorbed by the reader/viewer as a subjectivity. Without a first person to suggest a world and to open up the story and to place it in a particular psychic state, LD is left with manipulations of other variables in attempting to establish the authenticity of his material. Failure to establish some claim on authenticity in PB’s story, condemns its actors, whatever qualities they bring to the scenario, to the role of puppets, cardboard cut out figures of the type that regale us in the adverts before the movie. All show no depth. On viewing PB it seems as if LD has targeted the settings the locations and the sound track as affective attributes to gain some traction on the attention of the viewers; attributes that are fashioned to lay some claim to signifying a reality, an authenticity against which the actors can strut their stuff. But the backgrounds in PB have been fabricated for their authenticity as period settings in themselves; not for their effect in suggesting or creating a world. In PB, LD’s settings do not comprise psychic containers for his material. The locations or situations all look right, but they are no more than wallpaper, they bring nothing of substance to the film; they lack qualities in themselves that might bring a sense of foreboding or prescience to the film and envelope its narrative. The film ends in the swamps (perhaps figuritively in the swamp of filmmaking), but there is nothing in the film that leads us to this world of the swamp. It seems more like a tourist destination where we can go to experience an otherness of environment and weird people. The swamp is swamped out by the desultory narrative that leads us there for want of anywhere else to go, not through some psychic imperative of drowning or sinking or being sucked in. The purpose of the swamp in PB is shown in the final shot of the film. The swamp is not a state of mind that pulls you down drowns you in its fetid reptilian waters, it is just a place from which to escape. This last shot sees Jack leave the swamp on the boat carrying out the murdered bodies of Charlotte and Ward. The camera pans from the narrow channel of the swamp water to the blueness of the ocean and its vast and boundless possibilities. And the voice over, which by this time has lost any credibility, informs us that, just like in the old fairy tales, it all works out ok for Jack: he ends up becoming a famous writer. Another lay of old Hollywood. It’s the familiar formula: trick out the film in a period (50’s 60’s 70’s – take your pick!) pay great attention to getting the ‘look’ right and then allow the script to play on the anachronistic gap between the period setting ( in this case ’60’s Florida) and today’s sensibilities. Finally fill out the sound track with lesser known unfamiliar but groovy records from the period. The purpose of the music is to fill out the psychological dimension absent from the scenario; and it is often more interesting than the image. (It used to require a certain specialist knowledge to track down these records but the use of the internet now makes it very easy: hence a number of films exploit this method of ‘filling out’ their material – Seven Psychopaths { another woeful Brit movie} also used this ploy) But the music in itself, in PB. is not employed with sufficient nous to add anything authentic to the film. It’s just a juke box in the pub stacked up with some old records. LD’s use of his tracks in PB, except for the bar scene, feels as if the music has been dumped on the soundtrack at opportunist moments with the aim of jigging up the audience’s attention a little. It is not planned or scored into PB’s sound track as part of the film ( or if it was in the scenario this might show how little the scenarist knows about film). Tarentino, Weir among others have understood how to use prerecorded records to affect. Otherwise it’s just background music. No affect. Just a trick. Lacking entry into a world mediated by a state of mind, the actors are forced to jump through LD’s ridiculous hoops to try and convince the audience of the credibility of their actions. The worse afflicted is Nicole Kidman (NK). A particular instance is the first visit to the prison by the ‘group’ in order to see Hilary. As the Charlotte character is no more than a series of gestural demands from both script and director, the visit is reduced to extracting just another gestural action from her; in this case the crude and unconvincing acting out of masturbation gesture at the demand of Hilary. Because there is no access to psychic reality both Cussack and NK are forced into a caricature of forbidden discomforting (perhaps) sexual desire. (This type of physical gesturing of fucking is repeated to equally uninteresting effect when we do see them at work later, when Hilary is released, engaging in penetrative sex). For all her gesturing, eyeballing and accent KB is little more than a coat hanger onto which to drape a number of costume changes and listen to a number of old records. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Stoker Chan-wook Park (USA 2013) Mia Wasikowska; Nicole Kidman; Matthew Goode Viewed Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle UK 1st March 2013; Ticket: £8 a kiss is just a kiss This piece of Gothic Amerikana is in one sense another revisiting of Park’s (P) favourite theme, incest. The incest theme was the mainspring of Old Boy and it is the psychic mainspring behind Stoker but for this film the incest idea has been transposed to the ut – (dys)- topia of suburban upper middle class USA. The film takes its psychic mainspring from the eponymous word in its title ‘Stoker’ Some one or something that builds up a fire, feeds the flames. So either India’s hormonally charged sexual development that stokes the fire, or perhaps the obsessive nature of hypocritical family secrecy, the keeping of skeletons locked in cupboards, feeds the flames that burn through the scenario. Interestingly, the Stoker (der Heizer)is also the title of the first short story by Kafka and became the first chapter of his uncompleted novel ‘America’. At the core of the story is a grudge and the turning point of the story is a revealed quasi incestuous relationship between nephew and forgotten Uncle. Although Kafka’s short story is an imaginative journey, Kafka expresses an intimate understanding of his characters; whereas Park as director communicates detachment from his material. As if his main point of contact with this cultural strand of American life has been watching the movies of Terrence Malick. Like Hollywood in general and Malick in particular a careful avoidance of context (social occupational historical) is critical to the way that Stoker’s coding deciphers the human relations in the scenarios. There are no dates, no real occupations (there are offices locations of employment but these too are dislocated decontextualised. [nb the deceased Mr Stoker is supposed to have been an architect but the house does not look like an architects home]), no media. Only hermetically sealed worlds in which the angels and demons of a shared post Spielberg moral consensus can be set in play. We are looking at a deterritorialised characters. They exist as oppositions in relation to each other: husband /wife, brother/sister, mother/son, but not as possibilities in relation to the world. And it is in this world voided of the actual, that Park has chosen to direct Stoker. The world as a bell jar. P’s style of filming is very like the cinematography of Malick’s movies. The tracks have a similar slow floating enunciate style which functions as a cue, that something of significance is in train, whether or not this is the case. The look of the S has that same hyper real HD luminance that is intended in Malicks’s cinematography to imbue the shot with a symbolic shimmering resonance; the more banal the shot the more both Malick and Park work to give the images a liminal meaning to add lustre and link to narrative structures shaped more by cod psychology than real forces. Hence perhaps, this piece of American gothic, like other films such as Ramsey’s ‘We need to talk about Kevin’, is filled out with Americana weird. Little shots, bolted onto the shooting script to show us that the film has moved into ‘weird’ territory, so that we can expect weird ‘stuff’ to happen. Stoker has it’s insects (Bunuel inspired perhaps), the fetish object it makes of India’s shoes, eggs, the metronome etc all which are supposed to imbue the scenario with psychic significance, psychological depth. In effect this style of film,to avoid taking risks, abuses symbolism as an cheap and easy means to express inner movement. The reason I use the word abuse is that the symbolism used by Park here and Ramsey is plucked from a compendium of Freudian dreams, an c arbitrary or opportunistic plucking from the dictionary. The symbols and the symbolic images they generate are not won from context, grounded in the material and then understood as possessing a wider signification. Like the shoes in S they are represented from the start of the film as being very significant. They then become a little puzzle built into the film; why are these symbols significant? Like Malicks’s script, P puffs out S with inscrutable philosophical phrases, lines spoken by the lead characters. These have a fake Zen quality, perhaps because faux Zen is perfect grist to the Hollywood script mill. Whereas insights that are hard won in the Zen tradition, in the Hollywood tradition they can be cheaply traduced as realisations, exploited by Hollywood scenarists who need a fix of philosophy to bulk out their characters. Malick tends to bulk out his characters’ emptiness with little quips about the realisation of ‘love’, by way of bestowing meaning on the proceedings. P and his script writer Miller, use the same ploy to insert proto Nietschian sentiments into the mouths of the characters from time to time. So we have India telling that she is as she is because…..’ a flower doesn’t chose its colour.’ Debatable what this means, but it is the basis for presenting the triumph of nature over nurture. A kiss is just a kiss….? Like many film of this type it is ultimately rendered uninteresting by its intrinsic mechanicality. A slasher vampire or zombie movie is enjoyable in its mechanistic working through of permutations of death. But these movies generally avoid inventing formed characters to whom the viewer can assign markers of an assigned individuality. Evelyn Stoker is such a character in Stoker, supposedly the widow of Richard (there is a case that Charlie and Richard are split personalities of the same man) and mother of India. P lavishes his movie with an opening relationship between Evelyn and Charlie, but then the script reveals this relationship is really a cover for the hard on that Charlie in fact has for India. We gaze upon this reciprocated revealed incestuous relationship, as does Evelyn who witnesses a deep French kiss between the niece and uncle (father?). When Charlie realises he has been seen with his tongue down India’s throat, he tries to divert Evelyn into dropping her guard, by making an immediate play for her (before admittedly strangling her with his strap). Now this play for Evelyn is led with his tongue, which he extrudes and is eagerly gobbled down by Evelyn, who sinks to the ground under the passion of Charlie’s hot kiss. At this point we enter pantomime land, the never never land of the mechanicality of the film maker. Charlie can drop Evelyn’s knickers, pant on her, but he cannot kiss her on the mouth with his mouth still dripping with India’s saliva. The film dies back at this point. Park seems well out of his cultural depth with Stoker. It is made with a eye to stringing together a series of arresting arbitrary images to make a piece of gothic americana that he does not really understand. He did this sort of thing better in Korea where he understood better the transgressions and cultural parameters needed pull of this kind of movie. In the USA he only succeeds in making another weird deterritorialised movie. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Daughters of Darkness (Les Levres Rouges) Harry Kumel (Fr 1971) Delphine Seyrig Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne, 3 March 2013; Ticket: £5 retrocrit: Reading the runes in the dunes or Marienbad transposed… The seaside hotel by the sea on the sands at Ostend, that is the location of Daughters of Darkness, is an architectural statement that resonates along a parallel frequency to that of the chateau at Marienbad. Harry Kumel (HK) in visualising Daughters of Darkness (DD) must have had the notion that in having successfully contracted Delphine Seyrig as his lead actress, DD could take on in some of its formal aspects, the form of a subtle parody of Last Year in Marienbad (LYM) Geometry The interiors of both LYM and DD both allude to the taste spectrum and formal aspirations of particular social castes. The Ostend hotel built for a burgeoning bourgeois market seems to consciously replicate the pretensions of an earlier aristocracy. The resort hotel at Ostend is laid out as a palace, and its opulent geometrical reception and public spaces will have been planned as a sop to the aspirations of the European bourgeoisie and lesser aristocracy that in a more public sphere they could by imitation equal the taste of a foreclosed aristocratic age that defined itself by private opulence and conspicuous consumption. Whereas Marienbad was situate in grounds where nature was made subservient to an ornamental geometry imposed by the hand of man; the Hotel in Ostend is positioned by the sea. Its geometric lines with regular columns and serried windows seems built to oppose the force of the sea, but is doomed to fail, to be rendered insignificant by the elements of darkening nature. Within their settings, their variegated encompassings both LYM and DD share a metaphysical core, which revolves about ideas of time. LYM with its infinite tracking across surfaces and through mirror worlds, creates a metaphysic of time that is presided over by the unnamed woman (Delphine Seyrig). Time becomes a function of space, a function of a Nietzschian eternal recurrence. More crudely perhaps DD, with its vampire and human blood theme also has an underlying temporal motif, the notion of eternal life, life eternally relived and renewed through the medium of human blood. It may be thought that LYM is much subtler in its insinuation of the time motif, but there is attaching to Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s mis-en-scene, something of the form of a religious sacrificial ceremony. Appropriate then that Delphine Seyrig (DS) should play a key role in both movies. But whilst her role in LYM is pivotal, in DD is central. With her performance as the Comptess de Bathony in DD, her persona dominates the film from the moment she enters frame poised like a spider at the centre of her web waiting to enmesh and devour her victims. In her poise, DS effortlessly assumes the high status of her queen spider/ high priestess and whilst on screen she spins our in her delivery of her dialogue, a spell of enchantment, effortlessly without over determination or crass exaggeration. The delivery of her lines, pulled from the silky depths of her throat, is perfectly synchronised with her breath and the vowels shaped delectably by the reddest of red lips. The voice engages at once both with a knowing entrapment, but also with an ironic distancing that allows us to see she is having fun with her arachnoid role in a vampire movie. She knows how to wear the frocks with an architectonic nuance as she has been here before in another incarnation albeit with a different haircut. In LYM the dresses were breathtaking, all white and feathery, DS a priestess cold with erotic indifferent to imprecation. In DD, HK encases DS’s body in a series of unceasingly stunning power frocks, blacks and golds enabling DS to move through the scenario beguilingly and effortlessly with increasing power as the personification of the hunger for death. In both DD and LYM, DS embodies the dark side of the anima, the feminine bringer of death; both movies are built upon her abilities to bring onto the screen this idea of a lethal anima. In filming DD HK was assured and confident in the understanding of how to use signs. Signs are of course what make horror movie genre work. Contradictory signs relating to roles, and the directional signs that point without ambiguity to the path the script will follow in pursuance of its narrative. The signs that point are critical of course for arousing anticipation, and anticipation either of pain or fear is what powers states of arousal. Many contemporary horror films, such as the Cabin in the Woods often archly overplay signs, making them very blatant; intended it would seem, not to arouse but rather set up the viewer for an ensuing voyeuristic gore/ slash fest; satiation of violence, rather than fear, being the purpose. So some ‘horror’ movies made today almost do away with the use of psychological signs preferring to cut straight to the chase, the final blood sequence, either played for laughs or whatever. Movies of this era, such as DD, rely on signs to prime the audience ( which is not to say that many of the films are not tongue in cheek and capable of ironic self comment – DD often is.) But the viewer is given work to do in interpretation of signs and allowed to build their own anticipation of outcome. Movies shot using such formal scripted methods enlist more viewer involvement and the occasional moments of dread. There is no voyeurism rather it is anticipation of outcome that holds us, the sign pointing the way. The play on our minds. Haircuts play a important part in the filming of DD as of course they do in many movies – in particular film noir. But in DD, and horror genre they have a particular use as signs. The hair of the those representing the forces of darkness, in this case Comptess Bathony, is usually rigidly styled, like a wig (baldness can have a similar effect), DS’s hair permed in frozen locks that frame her face like a judge’s periwig and suggest the idea of judgement, judicial authority. DS under her periwig becomes she who must be obeyed. It also functions as a counter sign to her voice which teases and bewitches, paralysing her victims in the interplay of contradictory signage. Victims hair for a woman is usually long, often blond and hanging long. In DD, Valerie’s hair covers her face like a death shroud, wrapping about her face, exaggerating and heightening the expressive affects of her eyes and mouth and throat. Like a lamb for the slaughter, the sign points as soon as she appears. DD is a woman’s movie in the sense that the only players are the women. It is woman’s business that comprises its subject matter; it is about the dark force of the female anima, In movies of this kind the men really have no role and therefore usually have nondescript haircuts. In DD Mark’s longish neatly cut hair marks him our from the beginning as a non player. Although he has a role, he is a pawn, not central to the forces at work and expendable. As a horror movie DD is old school, It does exactly what it sets out to do. It sets up what is going to happen allows the audience to anticipate it (understand the inevitable) and for the signed events to come to pass, and then it tells you they have happened. Managed through superb acting and excellent pacing, the tension and humour are balanced, and deliver to the audience a film that works as planned. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Possession Andrzej Zulawski (Fr
1981) Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema; 28 Feb
13; Ticket £5

retrocrit: Shot to death

Set in Berlin in about 1980, Zulawski’s
(AZ) Possession (P) was presumably intended to echo back, in its
psycho-sexual schizoid script, as an allegorical comment on divided
condition of Germany exemplified by Berlin split in two by its
East-West Wall and the rise of European revolutionary terrorist
groups. Art house intellectual horror was perhaps his intention.

The opening shots track down a length
of the Wall from the West looking over to the East, an enclosed vista
of boarded up delapidation and dereliction. Z then cuts to another
kind of architectural statement, a marble clad corporate headquarters
with serried columns, inside of which festers some kind of state
twilight agency. This agency employs Mark, in a non specific
capacity, and seems to have a sinister perhaps menacing security
remit.

And as a set up that’s it. There is
not much else that is cogently fed into the script to enable the
viewer to read signs in the film as to what it is about: it might be
an quasi- allegorical political piece, or something else even less
specific than the agency. Perhaps that is the point. However the
film was made at the height of the activity of left wing
revolutionary cells in Europe in Italy the Red Brigade and in Western
Germany the Red Army Faction, Bader-Meinhof activists. Both these
groups and the various spin off revolutionary cells, entered into a
train of murderous killings and assassinations justified both by
revolutionary liberation rhetoric borrowed from South America and
traditional European Anarchism and Maoist-Marxism; driven by a naif
belief in the USSR and China, and mistrust of the neo-fascism they
perceived at the root of the Italian and German democracies in
particular and Western democracies in general.

Public shock in Europe in the 70’s and
80’s, at the appearance of revolutionary groups in their midst was
further increased by the realisation that the members of the groups
hailed form the prosperous educated middle classes and that women
were at the core of these revolutionary groups. Given that women had
always played a prominent role in revolution (Rosa Luxembourg; the
nihilist groups of Russia in the 1870’s) this was hardly a surprise.
What was different was that this era was the time of the paparazzi.
Sex sold magazines and newspapers, and revolutionary women were ‘hot
dangerous dolls’! Dolls being the operative word as women were
scorned as independent agents so it was the convenient working
assumption that they were literally screwed into belief, by the
ultimate succubus, the revolutionary monster. So although it is in
fact poorly sketched out, and ultimately AZ seems to have lost
interest in the political allegorical model whilst making his film,
this is still the path that seems to be suggested allegorially at
least, that is taken by Anna in P.

Anna, despite being a mother, abandons
her husband (who is away a lot doing whatever) first, for a new age
lover who having practiced all the correct Tantric exercises knows
how to fuck her good. She still continues to try and pass as if
she’s leading a ‘normal’ life but, sexual degradation at some
undefined point in the movie, starts to invest her being and she ends
up in East Berlin the sex slave of a sort slimy betenticled squid
like monster, who fucks the brains out of her. It all ends badly of
course (as it did with the Red army Faction and like) in stake outs,
shoot outs and a final Armageddon. Oddly enough as part of the
narrative development AZ introduces during the second stage of Anna’s
corruption (when she abandons her child) a sort of doppelganger for
Anna in the form of Helen (also played by Adjani) as a good Anna, the
Anna that Anna was supposed to be, but had split from, introducing
another schizo level in the film, which again fails to add up to or
mean anything, just hangs limply like another dead branch on AZ’s
tree.

In fact the remains of the allegorical
structure are so slight that I felt as if I was pulling it together
from an intense reading of its residual signs. It’s possible this
reading might be purely fanciful. But in itself this attempt at
reading indicates the movies core weakness: it doesn’t have a core.
Z has shot a film empty of any force moving through either its
structure or content that makes for a coherent set of responses to
the material. As such P lacks tension. Even the shot, presumably
supposed to be the “WoW’ moment in the movie, when we see the
creature fucking Anna, panders to voyeurism rather than to horror,
affect rather than effect; in revealing this in all its full on
imagery, the monster becomes a joke rather than a force. Although
the shot is rated by the supporters of the movie, this is as voyeurs
( nothing wrong with this in itself); but direct gazing upon this
scene adds nothing to the movie as a whole.

Polanski’s REPULSION, on which some
elements of the film certainly the Anna roll has been modelled, has
the defining characteristic of being a forceful expression of a dark
carnal degeneration. Repulsion knows what it is about where it is
going, and takes the viewer on the appropriate cinematic ride. AZ’s
P, its sketchy (perhaps inexistent) allegorical structure, is fuzzy
and unspecific. It takes the viewer nowhere; rather offers them
‘moments’: pink socks, the beast, nasty slayings of people as if they
were sacrificial victims (RAF) some fun cod philosophical dialogue,
and architecture. But everything slithers into inconsequentiality.

One key element of the film holds it
together that makes it watchable.

Bruno Nuytten’s camera work is
extraordinary, embedded not just into the structure but in the
possible reading of P. The camera constantly suggests the
possibility of effect. The camera, tracks, floats reveals and
penetrates. The movement of the camera through architecture of the
60’s apartment with its corridors, right angles and blocked fields of
vision, captures the menace that suddenly appears in the core of the
relationships of the family. The camera understands this space. The
tracks that float out from close-up scrutiny of a scene to wide shot,
powerfully suggest the opening out of awareness to a new dimension.
The reveals such as across Mark and Anna as they lie in their bed,
the penetration of the camera into the darkness, all prime the viewer
to expectation. However the expectation is all there is, as after
these camera movements, the viewer is usually dropped back into
incoherent void that comprises P. But in itself the camera movement
is so assured and composed that it holds the incoherence together.
The final shot, around the spiral staircase, although empty in
content is so full of architectural form, as to almost be complete in
itself.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Django Unchained Quentin Tarantino (USA 2012) Jamie Foxx; Leonardo DiCapprio; Christopher Waltz Viewed: Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne Ticket £3.60 Digestive problems Viewed on the budget ticket night (Tuesdays) the cinema was full of people eating buckets of popcorn and trays of Nachos. Set in 1858 in Texas and the Southern States of the USA, the only surprise in Tarantino’s (QT) latest confection of stylised violence, Django Unchained (DU) is that no one uses a mobile phone. They would certainly come in handy from time to time in the old West and raise a laugh that would cut above the corn. These days it’s almost cruel to deny the cowboy a touch screen, when every other anachronism is OK. DU is a movie that exemplifies the notion that film has little left to express beyond revisiting its own past and history and engaging in replication and recreation of itself out of its previous forms. Otherwise there is not much to say about DU or QT. Excepting that its bloated length and etiolated stretched out structure is not sufficiently justified by QT’s ambition of revisiting almost every style of Western from John Ford and Hoppalong Cassady through to Lars Von Trier, Arthur Penn and John Sturges. It’s a belly full o beans as Mel Brooks might have put it, who is paid extensive tribute in the faux KKK scene which is another anachronistic farrago (laboriously and mechanically executed). DU’s narrative is simply a device to enable QT to work through a sizeable number of action and sound images that reference the Western genre in all its poly-variant glory, whilst simultaneously exposing them to the distancing mechanism of dialogue and attitudinal gloss embedded in contemporary discourse. In relation to the referencing two areas of the film stood out: the film score in itself, and the landscapes and backgrounds. DU’s score is a key to the way in which the film psychically unfolds and affects. The score quotes and reprises every type of Western theme music of which I aware, from the 50’s to date. This music, much of it familiar even if not actually recognised, lends a disjunctive deconstructive element to the film, working to detach and disassociate the viewer from the relentlessly aggressive modernist stream of the acting and dialogue. The score, in itself, creates a meta track outside of the spacial contemporaneity of DU, a space that comprises the dimension of history. The score brings history and the traditions of the Western genre into the audience’s consciousness. The music allows DU to flow out from its performance bound present back into a referenced past The score adds the dimension of time to the experience. Time is located on one of the film’s tracks as a counterweight to the images and dialogue in DU that are uncompromisingly dedicated as a celebration of the present. The music in the score, at given points in the development of the narrative, swells and announces its momentary sovereignty in affective mood establishment. We hear in the music, the knightly decoriously attired apple pie cowboys of 50’s TV series, Cisco Kid Roy Rogers the Lone Ranger. These card board characters with their noble steeds such as Silver, and their side kicks such as Tonto, are briefly suggested, resurrected and brought back to momentary life as phantom presences. In the music, the epic Westerns of Ford and Wayne swell up in our minds. Films such as: the Searchers Red River True Grit, with their strange lone cowboy ballads, enter envelope and then quit remembrance, shadows flickering on the cave wall of the mind. As DU ploughs through later Rock n Roll thematic cowboy anthems suggested by the movies of Sturges, Peckinpah and even Von Trier (I count Mandalay as a Western) so too moments from these films are reinvested in the score. Softening the edges of an uncompromising contemporary bad ass script, the score, in mediating other filmic eras of fantasy and style, folds into the action, the dimension of an immersed recollection in other images, that makes it possible to watch the film through. Many of the action images in DU of course pay homage to and quote all these types of films (some of the images of horses were pure revisiting of the horses in the 50’s US cowboy series) But it is the music in the score that carries the history and which connects us to a cultural collective memory. In a similar vein the backdrops and landscapes against which QT shot DU, serve a similar function to the film’s score. Their purpose again seems to be to act as an historical reprise, to trigger nostalgia for earlier simpler forms of the genre. QT moves DU through the whole lexicon of Western locations. The obviously fake studio recreations of ‘rock outcrops’ and ‘camp sites’ through to the delirious encompassing landscapes of Ford and other outdoor directors: the grand magnificent vistas that promise to open up the whole world for us. The movement between these exterior locations and the ‘back lot’ studio look of the small Western towns in DU, gives the film a dynamic range of image quotes from a wide range of earlier Westerns, which in themselves, as the film develops into an obvious pastiche, lends DU a sort of mantel of cod authenticity. Although the narrative revolves round the raw issue of slavery and its horror, the acting out of the sequences, the mannered detached stylisation of the actors ( who perform in the manner of actors in adverts), never permits QT to develop the film as anything more than a stylised exercise in violent sequences. Any more than James Bond could make any informed statement about the politics of democracy, no more can DU be considered an angry diatribe against the evils of slavery. These films are about style and detachment from the real and the actual. As such, DU is a film that speaks to an audience that consumes violence in the same way that they consume pop corn and nachos: mechanically with little discrimination and in huge amounts. There there is a whole dimension of street violence that is concerned with how it looks, personal style rather than what it means. DU as stated earlier may be a bloated overlong production, but as a movie, pregnant with its own past, it is QT’s best filmic statement for some time. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Foxfire Laurent Cantet (2012 USA) Raven Adamson, Tamara Hope Viewed: Cinema at Villette Paris Ticket: Euro10.50 On the right to choose. This is the second time Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Foxfire (FF) has been filmed, first time was in 1999. I haven’t seen the first film adaptation or read the novel which is set during the ‘50’s in small town upstate New York, the sort of community familiar to Joyce Oates from her own upbringing. It is a location that will not be familiar to Laurent Cantet (LC) from his upbringing, but to a limited extent, the setting and situations dealt with are perhaps familiar territory from his previous movie Entre deux Murs, which also adapted a biographical novel and dealt with the experience of a teacher in a tough deprived Parisian suburb. But Foxfire for me charts LCs own personal filmic journey, in which this film maker previously concerned with narratives connected to realist situations starts to relocate his subjects in the world of fantasy. In the case of FF the world of the child is remoulded outside of the classroom of Entre deux Murs and projected onto the wish fulfilment structure of the peer group: the girl gang. It is my impression that in traditional story telling, from fairy tale through 19th to mid twentieth century narratives, the child is portrayed predominantly as victim. Both in fairy and in Victorian story, the child was a pawn of the moral. The child suffered within the strictures of its structured relations; but the good child eventually with help from magical creatures or the working of destiny, was restored back to the world in its rightful place. Children were in the worlds of Dickens or of the Fairy Tale the object of moral and social forces that were beyond their control; of relations with power that were not of their choosing. Even Richmal Compton’s creation ‘William’ for all his proactive exertions, always in the end had to bow to the authority of the adult world. In literature and above all in film form for some time now the child has been recast as the active protagonist. The child is no longer victim but a player. Like the action hero the child is author of its own fate. In a sense the child is accorded full rights to a fantasy existence which is in accord with the consumer ideological ideal of always being able to choose. It is an ideological imperative of this right that the dream of the child should conform to the adult world view: the contemporary Weltanschauung. The mapped out possibility of the child being enabled to exert influence over the world as a fantastic realm, is an extension of Hollywood’s extension of the American Dream, which signifies in its story lines the right of individuals to self determination. Contemporary films for children (which are also made with adults as a target audience) constitute a logical extension of this right to self determination into the domaine of the child. The child being traditionally an agent unable to shape its own destiny, more a pawn than a castle, becomes a mover and a shaker, a fully fledged consumer able to live the dream able to buy and buy into the dream. As children are only active in limited spheres of activity, mostly home and school, the film industry has had to recast these locations as fantastic worlds in order to be able to play out narratives of determination populated by children. Adult scenarios in films may be of course fantasial narratives but realistic settings provide a structural framework holding the self evidential nature of the fantasy in check. Films featuring child protagonists and set in the world of the child, are located either in straightforward magical parellel worlds as seen in the Harry Potter series; or as in the case of FF, the setting and story are retrojected back in to hazy past, such as the ’50’s that is familiar but different. This setting with its locations props and costumes are authentic up to a point but can exploit the potential of anachronistic attitudes in the children. This allows contemporary attitudes to sport themselves, particularly in dialogue, giving cheap and easy exchange victories to the child protagonists. Interestingly Harry Potter and FF share some things in common in this process of empowerment of the child. Both are set in a sort of cosy past of certitude and both employ the idea of groups of children held together by secret oaths and the bonds of ritual. In FF, justified by the anachronistic power of retrospective morality, it is the gang of girls led by ‘Legs’ who occupy the moral high ground and whose actions are both successful and righteous. They live the dream of a fantasial empowerment, and assimilating the consumer diktat: desire. Whilst having a place in the developing current ideological discourses around child empowerment, FF offers nothing to film. The camera work is superficial and adds nothing to the film except the need to get from shot reaction shot. From one thing to another. The film image is flat and layered looking as it is in many HD productions. The acting performances from the adults is two dimensional cardboard. The script ponderous, concerned with conveying attitude rather than state of mind, and the performances of the girls whilst occasionally arresting, are mostly mechanical as they plough their course through the film from event to event. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Skyfall Sam Mendes (2012 UK) Daniel Craig; Judy Dench Javier Bardem Viewed: Empire Cinema Newcastle Ticket £3.60

Post modernist conceit – in a good way

OK it is James Bond, but rather than Ian Fleming it is Orson Welles who lurks in the shadows of Skyfall (SF), a film that pays its dues to cinema rather than literature.

Welles’ filmic genius penetrates the movie at all levels including its actual title. The coy revelation of the source of the film’s title, the name Skyfall, carved onto the gatepost of James Bond’s ancestral Scots home in the last action sequence, is reminiscent of the Welle’s equally restrained disclosure of the source of ‘Rosebud’ in Kane. Operating at different levels both reveals serve as pointers to a mysterious past that is about to be consumed in flames and vanish forever. Names without a trace….

The Shanghai fight sequence in SF that is shot exploiting the refracted images created and multiplied by the glass surfaces within and without the structures of Shanghai’s light blazoned skyscrapers, instantly calls to mind the shoot out sequence in Welles’ Lady from Shanghai. In lady from Shanghai Welles and Rita Hayworth engage in a lethal gun fight in a Hall of Mirrors. Like the earlier Welles sequence, SF’s exploitation of a world generated by the interplay of replicated images creates a destabilisation of identity, a confusion of action and an intensifying of effect.

Lastly the sequences in the London Underground call up Welles’ most famous screen role as the Third Man, the master of Vienna’s underground sewer system. Javier Bardems intimacy with the subterranean and its many doors, recall Welles ample elfin movements in a similar environment.

As an action movie the scenario of SF has to facilitate the film’s movement from one set piece situation to another. In SF the 6 set pieces, as in almost any action film are realised very well. In many action movies the ideas driving the scenario are simplistically contrived oppositions childishly conceived and lacking developmental stamina, these action films simply run out of road. But holding SF together as it shifts through action are a number of loosely knit understated psychic strands that locate what we see and situate the script in a world characterised by some sort of meta meaning.

I am not referring to the incest motif linking M and Silva. In itself this dynamic works OK as a plot exciter, but it’s crude device and retreads familiar motivational passageways in many movies. The key feature of the script’s play on the incest idea, is that it does not work alone as an isolated gimmick; rather it is part of the film’s incalling of allegorical motifs that drive its narrative between the action scenes and sustain audiences’ engrossment in outcome.

A film franchise that counts 50 years of existence can only do so by constant reinvention of itself in terms of the signifiers it deploys and the significations to which it points.

James Bond started filmic life (Dr No) as a lifestyle agent whose persona was attached to a series of desirable consumer products. Aspirational signifiers were carefully inculcated into Bond’s Scots Britishness. SF has moved away completely from this. Unlike some contemporary US products of the action genre which seem little more than advertising billboards for the products of corporate USA, Bond and Skyfall avoid product placement. (symbolically perhaps we see the famous Aston Marin destroyed) The place that Bond is occupies now is very different world from the world of Fleming where he started,. The product consuming British agent has elided first into a superhero charged with saving the world, and now, in Skyfall has again moved on to something quite different. In Skyfall JB has morphed into a spirit entity, a phantom being from the Land of the Dead. We can see this most directly in Bond’s face: at this stage of his incarnation as JB, Daniel Craig has very very old looking eyes: there is no doubt that he is an old soul. As indeed is Judy Dench (Admittedly she is old, but…Central Casting could have fixed that had they wanted.)

Not in its scripted dialogue but in its filmic realisation, SF has something of the patina of a Gothic horror movie, perhaps an undead/zombie sort of horror movie (in a good way). The the locations and the settings all suggest that the action is taking place in a world that is not of the living. The first pre-title action sequence takes place in daylight mostly, except for the tunnels, but thereafter the film mostly moves into night or places abandoned by the living or subterranean locations, the haunts of the undead. A Gothic sensibility pervades the mis en scene. This is not only a fashionable make over, but gives the internal movement of the film coherence and an integrity of logic. The new displaced MI6 HQ, is an old vaulted castle with JB, like Dracula about to be sent forth into the world of daylight; the Shanghai sequence a phastasorama of ghostly apparitions; Silva’s city of the dead; the London underground with its denizens of commuter zombies and the final stand-off at the haunted mansion which ends in flames and destruction. (A nod to Mandalay in Hitchcock’s Rebecca) SF is caste in Gothic form, located in Gothic space with a hero from the shadows of an ancient vanished civilisation that exists only in myth and the old stories.

Britain and Bond have shifted and gone through a time warp in SF. The forces in play have changed. At the start of the 50 year journey (Dr No) JB and GB were both part of an actual world, engaging with specific forces that could be located in that world. In SF, neither are part of the actual world: they are both relegated to the lower nether regions and can only act as phantoms involved in the psychodrama of their own internecine struggles. But their confidence in themselves is retained. Their maintained self belief, although ridiculous, is unaffected by their change of status from living to dead.

In SF JB is transposed to Gothic underworld as an agent of the dead charged with being the elemental psychic link between the mother son’s incestual cathexis.

Whilst signifying content and signification may have changed, a key element of franchise has not altered: the style of the actors’ engagement with content. The persona James Bond has always been a detached entity denotating and affecting a wry amusement both at self and at the world: even a world that is falling to pieces. The Bond franchise has stayed true to its distancing of itself from itself.

This detachment, the ability of the Bond movies to keep values and outcomes in this perspective is one reason for its longevity. The Bond films never engage with fear as a state of mind. In this they contrast with US franchise vehicles such as Batman which with their committed stance in relation to specifically American values, build their films about arousing fear as a state of mind in relation to the threats perceived in the world of these values being ATTACKED. The value attached to these values is so great that any sacrifice, even the DESTRUCTION of the whole world is preferred to the loss of these values that they hold so dear. This inclination gives US superhero films a bias towards apocalyptic endings, as in the 2012 Batman vehicle where the whole of New York is destroyed but the value of freedom is upheld and maintained. The question arises as to whether the repetition of such committed apocalypse scenarios can maintain the Batman franchise as long as he detached Bond model. Or perhaps the outings of the Batman series will have to be constrictively rationed. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Seven Psychopaths Martin McDonagh ( 2012 UK) Colin Farell Woody Harrelson SamRockwell.

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 10 Dec 2012; ticket £7 Stoney heart….

On 11 June 1963 Thich Quang Duc a Vietnamese Bhuddist Monk immolated himself in Saigon at the crossroads in front of the Cambodian Embassy. The act of self immolation was Duc’s (supported by his fellow monks and nuns) ultimate protest against the discrimination practiced by the Diem regime against Bhuddists. Diem himself, a corrupt reliquary of French colonial rule, was a Catholic and the regime used the Catholic religion as the touchstone of political reliability; to advance under Diem’s administration you had to be Catholic, although the South Vietnamese population was 90% Bhuddist despite a decade of forced conversions. Diem was progressively curtailing Bhuddist rights and expressions of their faith, and Duc’s act of self immolation was a direct response to Diem’s ban on the flying of traditional Bhuddist flags on the birthday of the Bhudda. Interestingly Duc’s heart survived intact both his self immolation and his later cremation which was viewed as an attestation of his sainthood. On the evidence of Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh’s heart, if he has one, will burn.

This historical digression is prompted by McDonagh’s movie Seven Psychopaths (SP) that has as one of its core interwoven stories, the tale of a ‘Bhuddist psychopath’. The monk story psychology is somewhat convoluted and unconvincing, but its raison d’etre is that a monk such as Duc, had he not immolated himself, might instead have sought out his revenge on the USA for their war in Vietnam. The story is admittedly almost deliberately confused. But it is clear that the Bhuddist protests of this era that included acts of self immolation, had nothing to do with protest against the USA; and that the Bhuddist ethos amongst the monks and nuns of South Vietnam at this time, had no place for violence against others. The moral bankruptcy of both the film script and the director/writer Martin McDonagh (MM) is evidenced in the manipulative distortion both of history and religion that MM has had to recourse to, in order to give his film even the semblance of an ending. A cheap trick that allows the film to go out with a ‘bang’ in one of its last sequences by exploiting the recreated image of a burning monk. As if this act and its corresponding image had any meaningful connection to the gash footage that had preceded it. A cheap trick.

The distorted history used as back story in SP is exploitative demeaning junk in the worst Hollywood tradition. What else remains? Certainly not the cinematography which is uninteresting and adds little to the film except to confirm its mediocracy.

The structure of the film is built on a sort of deconstructed model that is broken down into compartmentalised narratives that interlink with each other and with imaginary strands (most noticeably the Vietnam psychopath story) . The film’s structure is a knowing nod at post modernist and New Wave film sensibility. But the structure built on the intertweaved strands of dognappers, the travails of a script writer and a criminal gang, lacks a unifying dynamic. SP is not so much filled out with an idea but emptied out of ideas. Frantic chaotic desperate action replaces any semblance of a coherent film or dramatic theme. Lacking a material idea, the film is without energy; without energy there is no tension in the interplay and interrelationship between its strands; without tension there is no pace, only a confused melee of images. Without a structural dynamic, SP overdepends on dialogue such as the ‘pitching sessions’ between Marty and Tommy(?), Like the movie, the dialogue comprises a series of little ideas that amount to nothing much except the repeated arch suggestion of a story featuring the idea of a Bhuddist psychopath (sic).

The film relies on one running gag, the dognapping idea, which is the source of continuous referential humour; but the mawkish repetition of the device released by the idea of the heavy criminal having a big soft spot for his pooch soon ceases to be very funny. The film also relies on its humorous dialogue which takes its cue from the sort of interchanges that Tarantino perfected in his early films, interwoven with the sort of deadpan ‘silly’ writing Ricky Gervaise successfully built into ‘the Office’ series and a little Iain Banks thrown in for the lurid detail. The only trouble with MM’S writing is that it is laborious unfunny and patently derivative in the manner sometimes heard in pubs where one member of a ‘crowd’ is entertaining his mates.

The script development is so uneven that the characters can be seen only as mechanical ciphers, spurious affect machines for MM’s vacuous meanderings. The number of films that are patched up with music! People flood a film with music. They are preventing us from seeing that there is nothing in those images. (Robert Bresson – Notes on the Cinematographer) The soundtrack of SP is filled out with a selection of eclectic music. I sometimes wondered if MM’s choice of music was intended to take my mind away from rather than draw me into the film I was watching. After a quote from Book of Revelations, which opens the movie (again Tarantino type quote/homage referencing the hitman in Pulp Fiction – which is superbly structured) and a cute dialogue about Dillinger getting shot in the eye, the film breaks into PP Arnold’s The First Cut is the Deepest. Like the rest of the music in SP the song had no relation that I could fathom to anything that appeared on screen. I supposed the song, like the others, was in the movie because MM liked it and more importantly it operated as a powerful distraction from what was on the screen. ( and it probably cost a lot of money).

On the evidence of SP, MM is running out of road and has no where to go except Hollywood style distortion and manipulation of ideas. On the Sunday evening I saw this heavily promoted film the cinema was almost empty and what audience there was seemed unmoved by the spectacle before their eyes. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Amour (Love)
Michael Haneka (Fr Ger
2012) J P Trentignant; Emmanuelle
Rive

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle, 16 Nov 2012; Ticket £7.00

Empty box blues.

Amour is a film narrative expressed in Michael Haneka’s (MH) own scenario and enfolded in his particular directorial style.. After viewing the film my reaction was that the script for Amour is not in accord with his language as a film maker. Consequently the film is like a Japanese gift: the beautifully wrapped box that contains the gift is more singular than the contents

Amour shot completely in colour by MH, is presented to the audience wrapped a sepia hued patina that is redolently suggestive of the richness of the earlier life of Anne and Georges. The shooting comprises two types of shots already familiar from Hanika’s previous films: the long steadicam shots that follow characters through the increasingly familiar layout of the living space; and the formal two shot, set up as still life portraits. In Amour these two types of shots are interspersed with close ups, that often cut to reverse shot, to carry dialogue. The dominant theme suggested by the camera is that it represents that unseen presence,, the viewer’s gaze. We gaze from th outside upon the performances of the actors. We watch two actors at work evoking in their performing the processes of acute and chronic illness, understood in the context of what is presented as their long contented relationship.

Doors open and close, and feature in Amour as they do in other MH films. For instance the film opens with the couple’s apartment door smashed open by firemen. In Amour the function of the door and its frame differs from his previous work. MH in his other movies uses the door motif to suggest something about what it is possible to see. Doors are shot half open, only partially disclosing the space people and events. This framing sets up the viewer to engage with what is only partially revealed, to confront the world as a place where the hidden and the seen are in constant interplay. In MH’s films the audience is always outside, and challenged by MH to understand what is hidden and why. In Amour, the apartment’s huge French panelled doors with their impressive architraves are certainly prominent, but they serve only to seal off the space. As the apartment becomes a world of the dead, the door transposes into a gate, that is either open or closed, Beyond this there is nothing in the portal itself to challenge comprehension of what is happening. A person is dying a world is slipping away the door is closing.

It seems to me in MH’s films there are no internalities. MH does not work with subjectivity in the grain of his films. We are presented with facts of the matter; the actors play out the scenario which probes about the presented situation.

In Amour neither the camera work, nor the structure of the shots (what the camera allows us to see) nor editing, work to effect the viewer’s passage into the states of mind of the protagonists. We see the situation. It is a film about a situation. We stay on the outside of the situation; this is a film of exteriorities. As such Amour is a vehicle completely reliant of the expressive affect of its two protagonists, Anne and George, which ultimately defines the movie as an art house soap opera, worthy in its intent, barren in its execution.

The audience are cast as the watchers of the mechanics of the script. The script itself resembles a medico-sociological paper on status change in acute and chronic illness. The script cranks through the post stroke situations that sufferers and carers face: we see loss of speech and diminution of mental faculties, loss of mobility, the need for help in using the toilet, loss of bowel and bladder control, the bad nurse experience, the need to be fed, the final stages of consciously and emotionally experienced incapacitation. Each stage a little episode on the downward inclining slipway that eventually leads to the logic of mutual death. All of this is no more than a log with parellel emotive commentary. This emotive commentary, provided almost exclusively in the affect images of the actor’s faces, leads to a limited palette of the same expressive gesturing: suffering, stoicism, understanding. The longer the film continues the more evident it becomes that we are watching two actors faking it. This feeling of faking is particularly strong in the scene where Anne is killed by Georges. The camera pans off the close shot of George and Anne (who’s asphyxiating under the pillow that he holds down over her face) to Anne’s body which we see, for some 30 seconds or more, struggle and twitch as she dies. But we know no one is dieing. At this point Amour and MH lose all credibility in the banality of the literalised faked film image. For MH to film the faked twitching of Emmanuelle Rive is counterproductive and pointless, an insult to the audience. Not disturbing or shocking only irrelevant bad film making.

As it progresses Amour becomes desperate in its expressive devices. Towards the end of the film there is a montage of the watercolour landscapes which han in the apartment. The apartment space is almost overflowing with matter artefacts memorabilia of the past. MH is careful, except for a sketch of a bird in the bookcase at the entrance of le salon, to exclude this material from the imagery of the film. We are aware of it without being able to specify it. We know there are paintings but they are lost in the background. Suddenly as Anne enters the portaql of her last act, there is a montage of at least 6 paintings, all wistful landscapes The effect of this montage is to understand it as a rather heavy handed metaphor. Also intercut into Amour are a dream sequence of Georges and a fantasy sequence where he sees Anne after he had killed her. Both seem to belong to another film that was not made.

The one sequence that points to a revealing of internality comprises the scene between George and the pigeon that intrudes for a second time into the apartment through the open window. The scene is allowed to end enigmatically, though it seems likely that George having caught the bird, kills it, as a sort of emotional dry run. The scene opens up possibilities that are enigmatic dark and perhaps contradictory and which are otherwise absent in Amour, and for this reason the scene also feels like it belongs only tangentally to Haneka’s scenario adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Robert Bresson Season fall 2012, at Star and Shadow – an overview

Film screened: Les Dames de Bois de Boulogne (1945) , Au Hazard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), L’Argent (1983)

In the hand of Bresson mediums are the message

Viewing retrospectively a series of films by Bresson (RB) in the conditions for which they were intended, in a cinema and on a large screen, is a privileged opportunity to overview and penetrate more deeply into the mainsprings of his filmic demiurge.

The films exhibited at the Star and Shadow included movies from the beginning and end of his directing career, and two from the mid period of his output.

The first film shown at the Star and Shadow was RB’s second film, Les Dames de Bois de Boulogne. I think it is a disaster, but seen in light of his subsequent output it was a disaster from which he learnt and which revealed for him the only path that he could take: To thy own self be true.

‘Dames…’ is a film that has nothing to do with RB’s primary desire as director. “Dames…’ looks like a hard learnt lesson as to what happens when an artist betrays himself for the sake of the usual mess of la-la potage: image – recognition – flattery = death of self. You get to work with cultural greats like Cocteau, beautiful actresses like Maria Casares you become one of us and presumably get paid but you pay a price: the destruction of spirit. For some that’s a reasonable compact: but not for RB.

RB determined to live and work FROM THIS POINT on his own terms. ‘Dames…’ is Cocteau’s script; it is Cocteau’s film. It is Cocteau’s transposed revisitation of an old mythic theme, the revenge of the Queen on the Night (death) on the Life impulse. Costumed with sets and acting tuned into high opera this is Cocteau’s world of phantasmic yearnings finding form in film. It bears no relation to the concerns of RB: the earth and its substrate, the human situation and the conditions of life, which RB grounds not in Cocteau’s parallel worlds, but in the everyday, in rural or urban settings, amongst those who struggle to survive and whose daily decisions always have to have an element of primal calculation.

It is the expressive style of his actors that governs the affects RB educes in his movies. I think that the performances RB elicits from his actors make them into mediums through which the audience are able to see the situations that the films present. BR’s actors are signs pointing the audience to social relations; BR’s actors are not signifiers for the viewers empathic relations. Of course this does not mean that a viewer cannot have an empathy with Mouchette or Balthazar; only that such empathy is not grounded in the image but in the viewer.

BR’s actors do not mimic or imitate or use gestures and other physical expressive responses that excite the emotions. RB asks his actors to acknowledge and give recognition to the situations in which the scenario locates them. The actors are mediums, channels for the conduction of the implications of situations and ensuing events; they are conductors through whom the audience experiences what is happening. RB believes that responses lie in the viewer’s domain of understanding. In RB’s films, the viewer is not given a ride to vicarious emotional involvement, a shortcut to affective indulgence.

The stoic and disciplined use of this acting technique, in which the actors do not put out, is characteristic feature of Balthazar Mouchette and L’Argent. In relation to the cognitive and emotional in the films there are only our meanings, the understanding we chose to read. This is exemplified of course in the character of Balthazar the donkey. In the film he is a link between the different orders of human experience, a sort of foil to Marie’s course through life in the same village. Balthazar as a link is a construct through whom we can understand: cruelty, betrayal, sadness, desperation, neglect. But BR also points to perhaps strangely, a certain lyricism in life and in death. In the final scene of Balthazar the donkey finds death in the mountains lieing down to meet die in what we can understand as a sort of bucolic peace. This scene works because by this time, as with Mouchette who also dies a choreographed lyrical death, we understand that both Balthazar and Mouchette are constructs with who in the course of the film we the viewers, have had to form our own particular relation.

Of course RB’s situational acting, perhaps hard to accept even at the time that the films were made, is even the more so now. Some of the audience coming out of the films immediately commented on the ‘bad acting.’ Which is of course not the point, but also there were viewers who had seen beyond the acting into the layers that RB lays down in his films for the viewer to penetrate through his mediums.

My feeling on viewing Balthasar Mouchette and L’Argent is that Bresson was not much interested in narratives, so much as with situations and conditions. The conditions he was concerned with were those of human commerce in its broadest sense. Our being in the world which forms our relations.

His settings revolve about the material interchange which charactises life: shops, bars, smugglers, small time dealers, tenants and landlords all are forced into intercourse with each other. Exchange intercession sex drink work tending buying selling robbing thieving smugglings illness are conditions within which situations arise. Within these situations, events occur which have their own ‘life’ a ‘life’ powerful enough to overtake the characters. And in this commerce between people it is the hand to which the attention of RB is drawn. The hand, that busy dealing appendage, that when ‘events’ take over, has a mind of its own.

In RB films it is his hand at work and it is always the hand we see. The hand that grasps grabs caresses soothes holds pushes beats laments. The hand takes on its own imperative. The connection made by hand action repeats as a key motif through RB’s work. The hands at the ATM, the teacher’s hands on the keys of the piano, the hands that set lures, the hands that whip. When the hand leads ‘life’ becomes strangely connected. Through the hand the situations engender events that defy the logic of normal relations. The logic is not narrative in a psychological sense, it is the connective movement of the hand which shapes destiny. The burglar who on entering a house sees an axe and decides on impulse to wait for the householders to return and kill them. Just a connection. That is the dynamic RB engages.

What stops RB’s films being without hope, and generally if you look qt the sequence of situations and events there is a feeling that the characters are sliding into helpless and hopelessness, is simply the acting style. Balthazar, Marie, Mouchette, Yvon are connective devices through whom the audience is linked to their being in the world. Without emotional expression (OK Mouchette does cry, but why does she cry?) it is we who are confronted with the condition of the world and the hope if we look for it is only to be found within us, the viewer as a seer. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk